Monday, August 31, 2015

Of late psychologists have been surprised to discover that
many of their best experiments cannot be replicated. Since scientific knowledge
is based on the fact that the experiment that you perform in your lab will, if
conducted correctly, produce the same result in my lab, the fact that
experiments cannot be replicated suggests that they are something other than
science.

For want of a better term, let’s call it ideology. For my
part I do not have sufficient data to prove the case one way or another, but I
do suspect that in our ideologically driven universities, researchers often
skew experiments toward results that affirm bias. I suspect that they do not
even know that they are doing it.

Even psychologists whose work seems unimpeachable often seem
compelled to put it in the service of leftist ideology. This does not mean that
the science is wrong; it means that we need to be more cautious about how we
interpret results.

Consider the research performed by Swarthmore professor
Barry Schwartz about decision-making and choice. Schwartz has shown that when
you have too many options, you are likely to make a bad choice. When you face a
multitude of options you assume that you do not have to make a choice between
two imperfect choices. You will imagine that if you wait long enough something
perfect will come along.

Schwartz summarizes his argument:

When
people have too much choice, they are paralyzed rather than liberated. They
make poor decisions. And even when they overcome paralysis and manage to make
good decisions, they are dissatisfied with them. The “paradox” of choice is
that even though some choice is essential for human well being, too much choice
can be its enemy. And the debilitating effects of too much choice are magnified
when people follow another dictate from our cultural ideology and seek out only
the “best.” People who look for the best are more paralyzed and less satisfied
with decisions than people who look for “good enough”.

One thinks of the dating scene in a large cosmopolitan
metropolis. The more singles there are, the more difficult it is to choose one.
Young people get the impression that they can always do better and if they
choose one person they will be settling.

One might add that Republican primary voters are facing a
field where they have too many choices, and thus are more likely to choose
poorly… at least until the field is winnowed down.

This does not mean that choice is bad or that it should not
be freely exercised. If you have to choose between too many alternatives and
too few, you would do better to have too many.

Be that as it may, Schwartz has recently offered some
interesting reflections about work in the New York Times. While I think that we
ought seriously to question the Gallop survey upon which Schwartz is basing his
analysis, namely the one that suggests that 90% of workers the world over hate
their jobs, it is still worthwhile to examine his response to an opinion of
Adam Smith.

One
possibility is that it’s just human nature to dislike work. This was the view
of Adam Smith, the father of industrial capitalism, who felt that people were
naturally lazy and would work only for pay. “It is the interest of every man,”
he wrote in 1776 in “The Wealth of Nations,” “to live as much at his ease as he
can.”

Work may be struggle. In fact, it seems always to be
struggle. Of course, it is fair that work be compensated, but still that does
not mean that people are just in it for the money.

Smith’s view, which is well worth examining, suggests that
human beings are naturally lazy, addicted to sloth and would not work if they
did not have to. Were one to follow Smith one would have to say that the truth
of our existence is vacation, and that we would all jump at the chance to have
more leisure time. John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that labor-saving
devices would make it possible for people to work fewer hours and to enjoy
their leisure more.

The fact is, work-saving devices have created new kinds of
jobs. They have not caused people to work less.

These theories, as good as they sound, overlook the fact
that when we work we participate in a social organization, employ our skills
and energy toward a productive end, and involve ourselves in a myriad of
relationships with other people, colleagues, employees, staff, bosses….

As opposed to sitting around the house or the golf course
doing nothing but whiling away the time, working, for a social being, is an
active way to affirm one’s moral being. Beyond the money, it has much to
recommend it.

Schwartz continues to suggest that when management theorists
began with the idea that people hate to work they designed methods that forced
people to work by rote and deprived them of any discretion over how they did
their jobs.

Schwartz explains:

About a
century later, it helped shape the scientific management movement, which
created systems of manufacture that minimized the need for skill and close
attention — things that lazy, pay-driven workers could not be expected to have.

Today,
in factories, offices and other workplaces, the details may be different but
the overall situation is the same: Work is structured on the assumption that we
do it only because we have to. The call center employee is monitored to ensure
that he ends each call quickly. The office worker’s keystrokes are overseen to
guarantee productivity.

Of course, it is always possible to cherry-pick facts to
support an argument. The situation that Schwartz describes does exist, but it
is not efficient and it certainly does not exist everywhere. Ideology suggests
that capitalism makes workers into cogs in a machine. In fact, capitalism also
self-corrects. If it merely exploited workers it would long since ceased to
exist.

Given the profit motive and the incentive to have happier
workers, most businesses have figured out that structuring work on the Smith
assumption does not produce the best products and services. They adapt. They do
not need professors, even great professors, to tell them how to run their
businesses.

The situation that Schwartz describes must exist in some
places, but I find it to be the exception to the rule. I have many clients who
discuss the way their jobs are structured. Most of them work for employers who
allow them to do their jobs to the best of their ability.

And I, as you, have had occasion to call technical support
centers for help with complex problems related to, for example, computers. I
know that the calls are monitored, but I have never had the sense, in using Dell
support, that the technician was trying to end the call quickly.

Schwartz continues:

To
start with, I don’t think most people recognize themselves in Adam Smith’s
description of wage-driven idlers. Of course, we care about our wages, and we
wouldn’t work without them. But we care about more than money. We want work
that is challenging and engaging, that enables us to exercise some discretion
and control over what we do, and that provides us opportunities to learn and
grow. We want to work with colleagues we respect and with supervisors who
respect us. Most of all, we want work that is meaningful — that makes a
difference to other people and thus ennobles us in at least some small way.

We want
these things so much that we may even be willing to take home a thinner pay
envelope to get them. Lawyers leave white-shoe firms to work with the
underclass and underserved. Doctors abandon cushy practices to work in clinics
that serve poorer areas. Wall Street analysts move to Washington to work as
economic advisers in government.

For some reason, when liberals think about meaningful work
they think of charity, of serving the underprivileged, of being a community
organizer. They do not imagine that building a factory in which underprivileged
people can find remunerated work is better for their self-respect than being on
a perpetual dole and being beholden to do-gooders who are so wealthy that they
think they no longer have to work for pay.

Producing goods and providing services is meaningful work. It
is certainly more meaningful to give a man a job than to offer him charity.

One hastens to add that many employers have discovered that
their workers work best when they are given some measure of discretion over how
they do their jobs. It’s basic to management theory, as I understand it, to
know that good managers allow their employees to do their jobs; they do not
tell their employees how to do their jobs.

True enough, there is more to it than wages. But, work
becomes meaningful because it allows you to contribute to society, to
have your days organized and structured, to provide for yourself and your family and to be part of a group or a team or
a company.

Sunday, August 30, 2015

The presumptive Democratic nominee for president has been
stumbling lately. Even if Hillary Clinton gets the nomination it looks
increasingly like she will be a weak, even a losing candidate.

Meantime, the Republican Party is not bothering with
niceties like electability. It does not care whether a candidate might be able
to do the job. It is expressing its anger, venting its spleen, rising up in a
full-throated rebellion against the powers that be. Those who are not
supporting Donald Trump have been flocking to Dr. Ben Carson, a fine man if
ever there was one, but one who will never be nominated, never be elected and
will never be able to do the job.

Some have been saying that we need to understand how angry
the Republican voters are. But anger does not force you to dispense with your rational faculties. After all, the Democrats should be boiling with rage at
what Barack Obama’s reign has done to their party. To some extent they are
expressing it through Bernie Sanders. And yet, Sanders is not trying to destroy
the party establishment. And more savvy Democrats are hard at work doing what
has to be done to find a new winning candidate.

You might have thought that the radical left held a monopoly
on revolutionary rebelliousness. You would have thought wrong.

This morning the two best New York Times columnists weigh in
on the current state of the Republican slugfest. On the right Ross Douthat; on
the left Frank Bruni. Both are relatively young but you will agree with me that
they are a vast improvement over Tom Friedman.

Douthat looks at the current state of the Republican Party
and asks whether it will know how to deal with the Trump challenge. He answers: probably not. For his
part Bruni asks which of the Republican candidates is most electable, most
competent and most capable of doing the job. He comes up with Ohio governor
John Kasich. For my part, and for what it’s worth, I agree with both of them.

Douthat begins by saying that Trump is running as a traitor
to his class:

Trump’s
appeal is oddly like that of Franklin Roosevelt, in the sense that he’s a rich,
well-connected figure — a rich New Yorker, at that — who’s campaigning as a
traitor to his class.

Surely, the Republican electorate is reading this as a good
sign, a positive sign, a sign that Trump can be trusted.

Douthat adds that Trump is really running a third-party
campaign, not a right wing or conservative insurgency. He does not believe that
this is good news. He suggests that the two party system, for all its flaws, tends
to work better than multi-party systems:

So long
as there are only two competitive parties, the political diversity of the
country will be channeled through their sluice gates, and the (mostly
upper-class, highly-educated, self-consciously globalist) people who run the
parties will exercise disproportionate control over which ideas find
representation.

He continues:

Elites
can have wisdom that populists lack, certain ideas deserve suppression, and
multiparty systems are more likely to hand power to extremists or buffoons.
(It’s a good thing for the country that neither Henry Wallace’s effectively
pro-Soviet leftism nor George Wallace’s segregationist populism outlived their
respective third-party bids.)

In a functioning two-party system, the political parties
integrate the ideas of outsider or radical elements. Unless they are adopted by
a political party these ideas will never become workable.

But, Douthat adds, the system has not been functioning very
well of late:

And
when the two-party system is functioning at its best, party leaders can
integrate compelling third-party ideas, or even reorient a party entirely to
react to a public discontented with its options.

But it
has been more than four decades since the last such reorientation, and two
decades since the last time a third-party candidate saw his ideas even co-opted
by the major parties. Across the latter twenty years, the country has endured a
series of disasters that had bipartisan fingerprints all over them. Yet the
various movements that have arisen in reaction to those failures — the antiwar
left, the Tea Party right,
Occupy Wall Street – have yet to even unseat an incumbent president, let alone
change the basic lines along which the two parties debate.

Enter Donald Trump. To Douthat, Trump is anything but a
conservative force. His policies are all over the lot.

By now he is looking as though he can win. Douthat suggests
that he will not, but that the real question is how the Republican Party will
or will not adapt to him. He is not optimistic:

He
won’t [win], of course, but it matters a great deal how he loses. In a healthy
two-party system, the G.O.P. would treat
Trump’s strange success as evidence that the party’s basic orientation may need
to change substantially, so that it looks less like a tool of moneyed interests
and more like a vehicle for middle American discontent.

In an
unhealthy system, the kind I suspect we inhabit, the Republicans will find a
way to crush Trump without adapting
to his message. In which case the pressure the Donald has tapped will continue
to build — and when it bursts, the G.O.P. as we know it may go with it.

Let’s say that the GOP ought to adopt important aspects of
the Trump message. Douthat may well be correct to say that it will not be able
to do so, and will be destroyed in the process. Allow me to offer a brief
footnote: the more Trump trashes the GOP establishment and its elites, the more
he treats them like idiots and fools and incompetent bunglers… the less likely
it will be that they will be able to integrate Trumpism. It would require them
to bow down to a new master. Don’t hold your breath. The problem the GOP is facing is this: it's not about Trump's message; it's about Trump the man. Integrating the first is far easier than integrating the second.

I would add that Trump has been trampling Ronald Reagan’s
Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican. This
matters because those who Trump has been treating with contempt have supporters
and those supporters might just decide, if he is the nominee, to withhold their
votes.

And besides, if Trump is elected, how do you expect that he
will be able to govern a mass of people who he has insulted, diminished and
defamed. When he calls them into his office and says: Hey, stupid, do you think they will be filled with a spirit of cooperation? Do you think that they will all roll over and do as he tells them? I
suspect that it will look more like herding cats.

While Trump’s heresies are considered to be of little
consequence, many conservatives are unhappy with John Kasich because he seems
to be insufficiently conservative. Allow me a comment here. Anyone who has
actually governed has had to make deals. Someone who has never exercised
executive authority in the political world has the luxury of seeming to have
attained an uncompromising level of ideological purity. If he has never
conducted policy he can dismiss his prior opinions as just that, opinions.

Bruni makes the case of Kasich. Primarily, that he will do
better in an election against Hillary or another Democrat than any of the other
Republicans. Secondarily, that he is the best qualified to do the job. By implication, Bruni is suggesting that neither Jeb Bush not Scott Walker is likely to emerge victorious from the primary process. Today, that seems clear.

Bruni will probably not vote for Kasich. He undoubtedly
finds Kasich more congenial than say a Ted Cruz, but his points bear
examination:

He may
never make it out of the primaries. The odds are against him. And he has flaws,
serious ones, which I’ll get to.

But
that doesn’t change the fact — obscured for now by the bedlam of the Republican
contest — that the party has someone who’s comporting himself with unexpected
nimbleness, who would match up very well against Hillary Clinton or any other
Democratic nominee and who could give Republicans hope, if they just gave him a
chance.

And also,

He’s
now in his second term as the governor of Ohio, and that’s not just any state.
Along with Florida, it’s one of the two fiercest
battlegrounds in a presidential election, a necessary part of the electoral
calculus for Republicans.

He won
re-election there last year with 64 percent of the vote. That largely reflected
the weakness of his Democratic opponent, but Kasich’s current approval rating
in Ohio of 61 percent affirms his ability to please a constituency beyond
Republican partisans. His popularity with the voters who know him best came
through in a recent
poll showing him well ahead of Donald Trump among Ohio Republicans.
Meanwhile, Florida Republicans put
Jeb Bush, their onetime governor, behind Trump.

As for New Hampshire, where voters have had the best chance
to see Kasich in action recently, he looks like someone who can win:

In a
poll released early last week, he rose to second place among
Republicans in the state, behind Trump. That same
survey of New Hampshire voters showed something else interesting: In
hypothetical general-election matchups, Clinton beat Trump by two points and
Bush by seven. But Kasich beat her by two.

As for his conservative principles, he has a mixed record:

By
cutting taxes and controlling spending in Ohio, he proved his conservative bona
fides, at least on fiscal issues, something being stressed in a clever new commercial —
note the female and black faces, along with the use of the moon landing to
capture a yearning for American greatness — that’s being shown in New
Hampshire.

But
there’s plenty else that pegs him as independent-minded and might make him
acceptable, even appealing, to swing voters, whom he seems as well positioned
to capture as any of the other Republican candidates are.

He has
expressed openness to some kind of path to citizenship for immigrants who came
here illegally. He has shown little appetite for the culture wars that other
Republicans gleefully fight (although, it must be noted, he formally opposes
gay marriage and abortion rights).

Most
strikingly, he broke with Republican orthodoxy and with most other Republican
governors and accepted the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, a decision he
defended in a way that illuminated his skills as a tactician and a
communicator. He said that what he’d done made practical and cost-effective
sense for Ohio, and that his course was consistent with true Christian principles,
which call for helping the downtrodden.

Bruni suggests that a ticket of Kasich and Rubio can be
formidable. I suspect that it will do better than Trump and whomever against
Hillary and whomever, but also will have the best chance of winning against a
Biden and Warren ticket.

Saturday, August 29, 2015

It is difficult to underestimate the influence of German
philosopher Martin Heidegger on American universities. His ideas may be
unintelligible to all but the most seasoned acolyte, but his influence is
ubiquitous. Martin Woessner explains it in a the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Once
you start looking for them, Heideggerians are everywhere. But identifying what
they had in common with each other wasn’t easy. It was hard to tell who even
counted as a Heideggerian, anyway, especially in the United States — a nation
for which Heidegger himself had little positive to say throughout his life
(among other things, we had too much technology and too little history, he
thought).

And also:

Existentialists
claimed him as one of their own, despite his protests, but deconstructionists
did the same, and by then he was no longer around to protest. Pragmatists
sometimes made their peace with him, and occasionally poets and novelists
played around with his wordplay-filled writings. I found that those last ones
generally had the most fun, partly because they didn’t take it all so terribly
seriously. Critical Theory, Hermeneutics, and Phenomenology — theoretical
paradigms predicated on seriousness — each genuflected in Heidegger’s direction
at one point or another, sometimes skeptically, sometimes not. There was hardly
a corner of the American academy that hadn’t been infiltrated by some kind of
at least latent Heideggerianism —except, of course, actual philosophy
departments, where Heidegger often remained simply too foreign and too suspicious.
One had better luck finding him in anthropology, literature, or theology.

For nearly thirty years now, the academics who gloried in
Heideggerian thought have had to face the fact that their great hero, their
great guru had been a Nazi. Living in Germany during the Third Reich the great philosopher
joined the Nazi party and militated on its behalf. Once the war was over and it
was impossible to deny what Hitler had wrought, Heidegger remained obdurate in refusing
to accept responsibility for his Nazism. He never recanted.

No one should be surprised that an America academy where
professors are teaching their students to think like Nazis—without, of course,
knowing what they are doing—should end up producing young Brown Shirts who
enforce political correctness by shouting down the opposition and by shaming
anyone who disagrees with them. Their professors mark down any student who dares propose a politically incorrect idea.

As you know, Heidegger himself was a great fan of Ernst Rohm’s
Brown Shirted Storm Troopers and was deeply offended when Hitler liquidated them in the Night of the Long Knives. He loved the street theatre put on by
the Brown Shirts and disapproved the work of Himmler’s SS because it was too
organized and too industrialized. Heidegger objected to the Holocaust for being
insufficiently dramatic, for not being a sufficiently entertaining spectacle.

While Heidegger himself believed that the only true
philosophical question was the question of being—God knows what that is— his
followers have been tormented by the question of his having been a Nazi.

Of course, we knew it all along. By now, for seven decades.
After World War II, Heidegger was banned from teaching philosophy. Occupying,
forces wanted to protect gullible students from his Siren Song. After a few
years, French philosophers convinced the authorities that his philosophy was so
important and that he himself such a great genius that he had to be allowed to
teach.

This instituted a split, something like a Cartesian mind/body
problem. Heidegger’s thought was so important that we needed to overlook his
actions, especially his political actions. Even if his philosophy was teaching
students to perform pogroms, it was immaterial. The man was a genius. So what
if he had made a few mistakes in his life.

It is no small irony that, at a time of political
correctness, when student Brown Shirts will shout you down for using the wrong pronoun, their professors will be
spending their time trying to exculpate Heidegger from being a real Nazi.

After the ban on Heidegger’s teaching was lifted, the
question of his Nazism was put to sleep for nearly four decades. Then a
Venezuelan scholar named Victor Farias published a 1987 book called: Heidegger and Nazism.

It was a damning indictment. So damning, in fact, that many
proud practitioners of deconstruction instantly recognized that they had been
teaching their students how to think like Nazis. They decamped for the less
corrupt waters of neo-colonial studies.

Many others dug in their heels and became staunch defenders
of the faith. They were willing to recognize that Heidegger himself had certain
Nazi leanings and that he had attempted to put them into action when he was
appointed Rector of the University of Freiberg, but they insisted that his
philosophy was pure, that it had nothing to do with the Third Reich.

Now for the past couple of years we have seen the beginning
of the publication of Heidegger’s Black
Notebooks, a multivolume set of the musings of the great genius. We see that they contain a number of anti-Semitic and
pro-Nazi ramblings. To which Woessner sagely points out: if Heidegger did not
believe these things and if he did not think that they illuminated his
philosophy, why did he leave them to be published?

In Woessner’s words:

By the
time of his death in 1976, Heidegger surely knew that the notebooks in which he
scribbled his philosophical and political reflections were riddled with
dubious, even incriminating remarks. So why, then, did he decide not just to
include them in the edition of his collected works that would ensure his fame,
but also, and more importantly, to dictate that they appear as the culminating
volumes of the decades-long project? What could he have been thinking?

Heidegger may have thought that Hitler betrayed what he
(Heidegger) once called the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism,
but surely he held fast to the ideal and wanted his work to contribute to its
advent.

Since Heidegger had launched a massive pogrom against
elements that had contaminated Western philosophy and Western civilization, and
since he believed that it had all begun with Socrates, it is hardly surprising
that his call for a cultural pogrom against certain elements in the culture
should have been directed against attitudes associated with Judaism, among
other religions and philosophies.

One notes that a man like Alfred Rosenberg, a member of the
Nazi high command, someone who was tried and convicted and executed for war
crimes at Nuremberg, blamed Socrates for introducing the
contaminant that had ruined Western
thought… because, he explained, Socrates had been influenced by Judaic
thinking.

Among the aspects that hold the most seductive appeal for
graduate students is the Heideggerian notion that you should not hold the
genius accountable for the positions he took, the ideas he entertained and the
political actions he engaged. (I have discussed this in my book The Last Psychoanalyst.)

As I argued in my book, Heidegger railed against technology
and the Industrial Revolution, products of the corrupt Anglo-Saxon culture. He
hated capitalism for the same reason and strongly opposed Zionist Communism. He largely preferred drama to ethics.

How are we to understand it all? In
a new book Peter Trawny, the man who edited some of the Black Notebooks, argued
that Heidegger’s errors belonged to a grand historical drama in which failure is
a condition for success, and where you never have to say you are sorry:

Woessner writes:

How
tolerant you are of this kind of thinking will determine how persuasive you
find Trawny’s defense of Heidegger’s errancy, which entails accepting at least
three interrelated things: first, that Heidegger’s errancy was a necessary
component of his thinking; second, that his thinking was destined by the
history of being going back to Ancient Greece; and third, that this tragic
narrative exists not just beyond good and evil, but also beyond guilt and
responsibility, in an “abyss of freedom.” In other words, true thinking means
never having to say you’re sorry (see critics’
responses to Gregory Fried’s “The King Is Dead”).

At
times, Trawny’s meditation on Heidegger’s errancy reads almost like a kind of
secularized theodicy. He dwells as much on the inescapability of evil as he
does on the inevitability of failure. “For Heidegger,” Trawny writes, “evil
belongs to thinking. Insofar as it elucidates being, it elucidates evil. For
even evil belongs to the world-narrative.” But does this mean that, insofar as
I recognize the role I play in the “onto-tragic” narrative of western history,
I do not have to take responsibility for my actions? Is it all being’s fault?

Friday, August 28, 2015

Call it an occupational hazard, but psychoanalysts are mired
in the question of the lives we haven’t lived. Eminent analyst Adam Phillips
has addressed it in his book: Missing
Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life.

If psychoanalysis is nothing more than “overpriced
storytelling” as I have said in my book The
Last Psychoanalyst, then it must help you to craft fictions of the lives
you haven’t lived, the lovers you lost, the chances you missed, the riches you
did not accumulate.

It’s not about what was, but about what might have been. Of
course, it must also concern what might not have been. By that I mean that it’s
one thing to say that you missed out on joining the army because you preferred to
have your student deferments. It’s quite another to say that you missed out on
being born at the time of King Arthur's court.

Keep in mind, Phillips is the best writer and probably the
best thinker in the dying field of psychoanalysis. Obviously, he does not have
very much competition, but still, he writes clearly and well. He has made a
career of offering philosophical meditations that rationalize psychoanalysis— that excuse it while making it seem rational.

While others labor under the illusion that modern
neuroscience will rescue a moribund practice, Phillips offers the best defense
that today’s psychoanalysis can offer. In the end the defense is flawed. More
than anything, it shows us why psychoanalysis has failed. Still and all, it is
far more cogent than what passes for theoretical work in today’s psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis directs its focus toward the past, toward
your past history and your forgotten fantasies. And yet, as Freud himself
stated clearly at the onset of his brainchild, it cares far less about what
happened than about what you wanted to have happen. It’s not about the past
that you can study as history but about the past you never lived, about what
did not happen.

Unfortunately, Phillips unintentionally makes clear, once
you get caught in the quicksand of the past—whether it is the one you lived or
the one you did not live-- you can no
longer plan for the future. If you get trapped in the unlived past you have no
reference to any objective reality and thus will inexorably get stuck into a fantasy
world.

If psychoanalysis teaches you to introspect, to regret the lost
past or to desire the past that never was, Phillips is attempting to
rationalize the process—to make it seem rational and to excuse it, at the same
time.

In the end, he claims that it’s about knowing who you are:

Our lived lives might become a protracted
mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live.
But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.

Of course, Phillips wants us to be more philosophical about the process, as he is. He wants us to vacillate between our lived lives and our unlived lives... taking time off from our nostalgia to offer a few gestures in reality. But, if we are really that obsessed and that nostalgic for our unlived past lives, we might very well wallow in a semi-permanent depression (or
mourning), mixed with “an endless tantrum.”

But, what does it mean to engage
in an endless tantrum? Since tantrums have a beginning and an end—even if the
end is exhaustion--the phrase has no meaning. And, how is it possible to be in
mourning at the same time that we are having an endless tantrum? Is there
anything quite so unattractive as a temperamental child wallowing in self-pity
for his unlived lives while striking out in rage because he cannot live them
all.

Some therapists want you to get
in touch with your inner child? Phillips, a far more sophisticated thinker, is
saying that you can stay in touch with your infantile self by throwing an
endless tantrum. How well do you believe that that will help you to live your
life as an adult?

If this is really the way you
spend your time, then clearly you are not going to do very well in a future
that you seem incapable of confronting. If you mind is as preoccupied as Phillips wants it to be with your unlived life, you will have very little capacity to plan for the future, to use your imagination to consider alternate outcomes to your actions.

Nonetheless, Phillips does offer a philosophical meditation about what amounts to a dissatisfaction
with psychoanalysis. Of course, he does not call it that, but the conclusion is
inescapable.

It is easy enough to criticize
cognitive therapies for being unwilling to probe the root causes of your
problems and to criticize coaching for directing its attention toward the
future, but if the alternative is to leave you chronically depressed while
throwing endless tantrums, psychoanalysis does not have very much to recommend
it.

For his part Phillips offers a
path to redemption by waxing poetic about the process:

The unexamined life is surely worth living, but
is the unlived life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one
realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not
living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for
some reason are not. What we fantasize about, what we long for, are the
experiences, the things and the people that are absent. It is the absence of
what we need that makes us think, that makes us cross and sad. We have to be
aware of what is missing in our lives — even if this often obscures both what
we already have and what is actually available — because we can survive only if
our appetites more or less work for us. Indeed, we have to survive our
appetites by making people cooperate with our wanting. We pressurize the world
to be there for our benefit. And yet we quickly notice as children — it is, perhaps,
the first thing we do notice — that our needs, like our wishes, are always
potentially unmet. Because we are always shadowed by the possibility of not
getting what we want, we learn, at best, to ironize our wishes — that is, to
call our wants wishes: a wish is only a wish until, as we say, it comes true —
and, at worst, to hate our needs. But we also learn to live somewhere between
the lives we have and the lives we would like.

When you have suffered
through the experience of psychoanalysis, when you have failed to escape its
clutches, when you exit analysis being a true believing Freudian, you will have to find some use for the skill you have acquired about regretting lost opportunities.

To add a little much-needed
perspective—because Phillips is a semi-hypnotic writer—I would emphasize that
each time you make a choice—to go to this or that college; to live here or
there; to marry or to break up with him or her—you are discarding possible lives.

It’s a normal part of everyday
mental processing. Leave it to psychoanalysis to disembarrass you of normal
mental process in favor of a useless activity that risks leaving you manic and
depressed.

If you are a normal individual
you might recall the ones that got away but you will not belabor the point, because
belaboring it will prevent you from engaging in your current life and will become an obstacle to seeing the future, from making
plans and taking actions. Many psychoanalysts do not quite understand it, but you cannot look forward and backward at the same time.

The more you worry about what you
are missing, the less you will be able to enjoy what you have.

Since psychoanalysis, as I have
been wont to explain, is first and foremost about desire, it must emphasize
about what you do not have. It could be something that you have lost but it
could also be something you never had.

By definition you cannot desire
what you have, so focusing on what you do not have and cannot ever have is a
way to manufacture desire, artificially. It’s a gamble on the possibility that a
mental process, even an act of will, can sustain your desire, permanently.

On the other hand, such a desire
is really an artifice, borne of desperation and rage. I mentioned this in my
book because I find it to be fascinating: psychoanalysis cannot distinguish
between desperation and desire. The fact that you are desperate to have her (or
him) does not mean that you desire her (or him.) Even though, in both cases you do not have her
(or him.)

Human experience, at the most
elementary level tells you that if you are engaged in an amorous pursuit of her
(or him) and if you appear to be desperate to have her (or him), you will cause
her (or him) to reject your advances.

Phillips continues:

We refer to them as our unlived lives because
somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason — and we
might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason
— they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the
story of our lives.

As I said, “overpriced
storytelling.” Good psychoanalyst that he is, Phillips cares about producing a
narrative explanation for his life, one that will sustain a form of desperation
that he can take for desire. Yet, the most important part of this text is the
phrase: “for some reason.”

This should not be a mystery.
When we choose to turn right we are necessarily precluding the future that
would unfold had we turned left or driven straight or turned around. What
Phillips fails to notice, and I consider it a major symptom of psychoanalysis,
is the fact that we make many of our life choices freely and that, whatever
influences and temptations we suffered, we are responsible for them. What is
missing in Freudian theory is the notion of free will.

Without recognizing that people
have free will, psychoanalysts like Phillips can forge ahead and concoct a
narrative that seems to explain their lives. But this assumes that there is
only one possible narrative. We ought to know that there are many, not one, and
that they are all unsatisfactory. They assume that our lives follow
predetermined scripts, thus, that our decisions and choices-- our ability to
take responsibility or to evade it-- do not determine the course of our lives.

Phillips seems to be especially
drawn to the idea that we are all nothing special.

In his words:

This, essentially, is the question
psychoanalysis was invented to address: what kind of pleasures can sustain a
creature that is nothing special? Once the promise of immortality, of being
chosen, was displaced by the promise of more life — the promise, as we say, of
getting more out of life — the unlived life became a haunting presence in a
life legitimated by nothing more than the desire to live it. For modern people,
stalked by their choices, the good life is a life lived to the full. We become
obsessed, in a new way, by what is missing in our lives; and by what sabotages
the pleasures that we seek.

One sees herein the Freudian
mania about diminishing and demeaning human beings, depriving them of their
self-respect, their dignity and their propriety. And, as a good Freudian
Phillips has no real take on life in society, life in a group, life with more than
one other person.

For a Freudian, perhaps, there is
nothing more to life than seeking pleasures, but one understands that if that
is your choice you will be missing out on a great deal of what matters, to
yourself and to others. You are not going to be able to fulfill your duties and obligations to others if you are focused on seeking pleasure.

Were you to wonder about the
relationship between your lived life and the lives you might have lived,
Phillips offers this analysis:

There is nothing more obscure than the
relationship between the lived and the unlived life. (Each member of a couple,
for example, is always having a relationship, wittingly or unwittingly, with
their partner’s unlived lives; their initial and initiating relationship is
between what they assume are their potential selves.) So we may need to think
of ourselves as always living a double life, the one that we wish for and the
one that we practice; the one that never happens and the one that keeps
happening.

One admires the cleverness. For
those who are barely present in their lives or their relationships, who are
trapped in nostalgia, Phillips provides them with an easy excuse.

And yet, there is also the life
that might be, depending on the plans we have, and how we implement them. The
Freudian obsession with the past effectively deprives people of the tools
necessary for building a brighter future.

Just in case you were wondering
why psychoanalysis can’t work as a clinical practice.

Thursday, August 27, 2015

American politics has entered the twilight zone. As the
Donald becomes a serious candidate for president, conservative commentators are
aghast and appalled. If you want to read some really nasty anti-Trump rhetoric you
need but glance at the National Review.

Being as I live in New York, I have more than a few friends
and acquaintances of the liberal persuasion. To a man (and a woman) they are
thrilled by Donald Trump. They have no reason to attack him or to try to
destroy him. They are happy to watch the spectacle of Trump destroying the
Republican Party.

You might say that liberals and conservatives are both
wrong, because Donald Trump transcends normal politics. But, if they are both
right and if you think that the best hope for the American Republic is a
conservative president, you might very well live to regret your enthusiasm.

Many people think that American politics is such a mess that
we need a bulldozer to raze it all and start anew. To which Charles Cooke, in
National Review wrote this:

Does
the Republican party have problems? Certainly. Are there any circumstances in
which Donald Trump could be considered the best antidote to them? Not on your
life. To suggest that Trump is the best remedy for what ails the GOP is as if
to suggest that an axe to the chest is the best remedy for what ails a man with
bronchitis.

I am sure you hate it, but Cooke does have a point. If you
take it as a given that the system is broken, how can someone who never worked
in the system know how to make it work? If the state of Iowa or Wisconsin or
Texas has budgetary problems should it ask a real estate developer from New
York to fix them? Even one whose political speeches are mostly paeans to his
own greatness.

As for those Republicans who imagine that Ben Carson or
Carly Fiorina could do the job of POTUS, I have no idea what they are thinking,
or even if they are thinking.

I do not agree with Cooke that Trump is a new Narcissus. The
original Narcissus fell in love with his image while gazing at it in a limpid
pool. Donald Trump more closely resembles Howard Roark, hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

Howard Roark was tough and uncompromising. He designed phallic
buildings. I do not know whether he had a blond mane, but, as a leonine character, he even
had a roar in his name.

Others have suggested that Trump is a quintessential bully
and therefore that he is helping Republicans by showing that they do not know
how to respond to a bully, the point is well taken.

After watching Mitt Romney wimp out in the last election,
Republicans are understandably thrilled by the prospect of having a candidate
who, whatever his many flaws, will never back down… even when he is in the
wrong.

On the other hand, Trump’s habit of bullying journalists—especially
female journalists-- is not, in the long run, going to endear him with too many
voters. Beating up on Megyn Kelly does not make him look strong; it makes him
look weak and whiny.

Many Republican voters like Trump’s raw will-to-power. They
love the authenticity. And yet, when his critics examine what exactly he has
been saying, the results are none too encouraging. Trump tends to speak out of
both sides of mouth, to contradict himself and to look like he does not know
what he is talking about.

Yesterday, while he was suggesting that the Republican
Congress refuse to raise the debt ceiling Trump went off on a riff about the trade deficit
with China. Now, the national debt and the budget deficit are not the same
thing. And neither of them are the same as the trade deficit. Trump sounded
like he was free associating, as though he had not thought the issue through.

And then there is Trump’s appeal to evangelical Christians.
This one is far harder to understand. In principle, people who draw their moral
values from religion want a president who presents himself as a beacon of moral
probity, someone whose example, when emulated, will naturally produce a more
virtuous populace.

Jesus did not teach the will-to-power. The philosopher who
did, Nietzsche, was not a devout Christian.

After all, the president is a role model. He is the ultimate
role model. His behavior sets the moral tone of the nation. Religious people
were appalled by the example set by one Bill Clinton; they ought also to have
been appalled by John F. Kennedy.

Yesterday, Frank Bruni—yes, I understand that you don’t care
what he thinks, but he is, as a New York Times columnist, very influential—asked
this question of Trump’s Christian supporters. After all, they could support a
pastor like Mike Huckabee or a pastor’s son like Ted Cruz. So, why are so many
evangelical Christians drawn to the morally imperfect Donald Trump?

Bruni offers this observation:

If I
want the admiration and blessings of the most flamboyant, judgmental Christians
in America, I should marry three times, do a queasy-making amount of sexual
boasting, verbally degrade women, talk trash about pretty much everyone else
while I’m at it, encourage gamblers to hemorrhage their savings in casinos
bearing my name and crow incessantly about how much money I’ve amassed?

Seems
to work for Donald Trump.

But that’s not all. Bruni continues:

What’s
different and fascinating about the Trump worship is that he doesn’t even try
that hard for a righteous facade — for Potemkin piety. Sure, he speaks of
enthusiastic churchgoing, and he’s careful to curse Planned Parenthood and to
insist that matrimony be reserved for heterosexuals as demonstrably inept at it
as he is.

But
beyond that? He just about runs the table on the seven deadly sins. He
personifies greed, embodies pride, radiates lust. Wrath is covered by his
anti-immigrant, anti-“losers” rants, and if we interpret gluttony to include
big buildings and not just Big Macs, he’s a glutton through and through. That
leaves envy and sloth. I’m betting that he harbors plenty of the former, though
I’ll concede that he exhibits none of the latter.

When voting for president, one votes for a human being, not
a personality type. One does not vote for the man who most closely corresponds
to the right Randian (or even Randy) fictional character.

Several months ago, prior to the Trump ascendence, I suggested on this blog that it was not so good for the Republicans to have so
many vanity candidates. Other wiser commentators disagreed, saying that it was
good to be able to show off so many great, qualified candidates.

My point, if I may repeat myself, was that a party with many
vanity candidates starts looking like a vanity party, a party that exists to
stoke the ego of whoever comes along. And a vanity party does not look like it
is taking the office of the presidency seriously.

Moreover, a multiplicity of candidates fragments the unTrump
vote and makes it impossible for a single candidate to lead the counter forces.

Little did I know that the vanity party would find its supreme
leader in the ultimate vanity candidate, a candidate who excels in vanity and
who offers little more than vanity.

Take a deep breath… get ready for the good news: Virtue is
alive and well in America.

Remember the Ashley Madison hack? The site’s users were
exposed just last week. But then, we discovered a gross disparity between the
number of men and women on the site. Apparently, women are far, far less apt to
cheat than are men.

It's one point against the feminists who believe that women like
sex just as much as men and that women should be having sex just like men.

Now, Gizmodo has crunched the numbers and has discovered
that Ashley Madison was more a fantasy factory than a hookup site. It was
promising something that it could not provide: affairs. It turns out that the
number of women on the site was far, far less than the numbers advertised. The vast
majority of profiles of female affair seekers were fake.

What I
discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place
than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on
their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract
those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional
future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has
replaced them with badly-designed robots.

Those
millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared
to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled
together by bots and bored admins, or just user debris? Whatever the answer,
the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it
became that none of them had ever
talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a
profile. Actually, scratch that. As I’ll explain below, there’s a
good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to
actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison.

When
you look at the evidence, it’s hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of
men using Ashley Madison weren’t having affairs. They were paying for a
fantasy.

By now you will be slightly suspicious. If, by any chance,
your name had shown up on the list of Ashley Madison aficionados, what better
defense could you have than this one: you weren’t really having an affair because the women weren't real; you were
indulging a fantasy? Nothing could have happened because so few of the profiles
of women seeking affairs had been posted by actual women?

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Thanks to Forbes and to Kathy Caprino, we now know that
gender bias is real. Just as feminists have been saying, we are all sexists.
Which means that we need to do penance in order to atone for our sins.

But, what does this really mean? At best, it means that
people perceive men and women differently. But, if everyone thought that men
and women were exactly the same, wouldn’t that count as a delusional belief.
After all, the science is settled, men and women really are different… in
significant and not-so-significant ways.

Even feminists insist that an off-color remark made by a man
to a woman is not at all the same as an off-color remark made by a man to
another man.

The studies in question attempt to prove that gender bias is
real by showing that when men and women both assert themselves in a work situation,
they are perceived differently. Surely, it is true that men and women are often
perceived differently. But, why do we need to call it bias. Perhaps people are responding to differences in tone of voice, appearance,
posture and attitude. It is commonly known, even to feminists, that female voice has a higher pitch than the male voice, thus that the male voice, for reasons that we ought not to attribute to the vast right-wing conspiracy, commands more authority and respect.

If you are studying leadership and management ability, you
cannot do studies in which no one knows the speaker’s gender.

Of course, you can run experiments where you reduce the
importance of perceived gender. In a famous experiment, judges were asked to
appraise male and female musicians when they did not know whether the musicians
were men or women. The result: they had a higher opinion of women performers
when they did not know that the performers were women.

In that case, it seems that gender bias did exist. If a musician's place in an orchestra is merely a function of how well he or she plays, this would be relevant.

One might even note that judgment is based on experience and that
judges may have heard, over time, more better male musicians than females. Perhaps
there are other reasons. Perhaps women are not as reliable when it comes to
showing up for rehearsals and performances. Then again, perhaps orchestra leaders are bigots. Whatever the case, the results cannot
apply to situations where women and competing against men for leadership
positions.

Perhaps I am not reading this correctly, but the study seems
to show that being forceful and assertive is generally considered to be a
negative, in both men and women. Along with the research comparing introverts
and extroverts, as reported here yesterday, this tells us again that people who
are more extroverted are considered to be less competent leaders.

Of course, the study seems to have been designed to support
Sheryl Sandberg’s advice for women to Lean In. But, it says that when women do
so, they are punished more harshly than men who do the same thing.

For all I know, the experiment might be telling us that
leaning in is a bad idea and that it is worse for women than for men. To which
Caprino and Co. would respond that a good leader must be forceful and
assertive. But, as Elizabeth Bernstein noted in her column about introverts,
the best leaders are anything but forceful and assertive. Leadership is not an
exercise in imposing your will on others.

We must also consider the fact that all of this
self-assertion is really macho posturing. Real strength of character, to say
nothing of real manliness, is not shown by blustering braggadocio. One must add
that, like it or not, men are more naturally suited to macho posturing than are
women.

In other words, a man who is acting macho is exaggerating a
quality that he probably possesses.. A woman who is acting macho is pretending
to be something she is not. A macho man might just turn out to be manly. A
woman pretending to be a macho man is not going to turn out to be manly.

When a woman is induced to pretend to be a man, she takes
the risk that she will not be perceived as knowing who she is. Moreover, she
might even be mistaken for a feminist, thus for someone whose loyalty to her
ideology is stronger than her loyalty to her company.

Obviously, the world has known many great women leaders and
managers. In some situations they succeed by surrounding themselves with males…
thus mitigating the notion that their leadership is coming from a more feminine
place.

Margaret Thatcher was firm and decisive, even forceful. And
yet, she surrounded herself with men, and went out of her way to show her
strength and courage. By being the only woman in the room, Thatcher was able to
assert her authority while allowing everyone to think that it had a manly quality.

On the other hand when Hillary Clinton tries to be decisive
and forceful it comes across as posturing. But, Hillary has taken
a tack that many other women leaders avoid: she surrounds herself with
women. And, we must add, she has notably lacked
professional achievements and accomplishments. If we were to judge her on her
ability to run a presidential campaign, even with the assistance of Bill
Clinton, she seems clearly not to be up to the job.

Still, rather than declaim against gender bias, culture
warriors who are really interested in women’s professional advancement would do
better to advise women to show that they like being women and to help them to
find ways to manage the perception of their relative weakness.

In truth, women are constitutionally weaker than men. In
many jobs it does not really matter, but if one is conscious of the fact—who isn’t?—one
cannot just turn off the consciousness because it is politically incorrect. Some
women leaders have found ways to deal with the situation. They have not done so by denying that they are women. And they have not done so by laying a feminist
guilt trip on the world.